This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Traditionally collisions of transmitted packets in wireless networks have been treated as a hindrance. If however the information contained in the packets is recovered even after the packets collide, significantly higher transmission rates can be attained in wireless systems. The project is developing a novel network-friendly approach for resolving collisions.
The relevant information is being extracted from collided packets through sophisticated signal processing and higher layer resource allocation schemes that function in conjunction with the physical layer techniques. The signal processing techniques recover the relevant information by exploiting source of diversity that are present in a collision, such as small user delays and carrier frequency offsets. The higher layer resource allocation techniques maximize the throughput and minimize the delay in end-to-end delivery of information through the exploitation of collision resolution capabilities at the physical layer.
This research will lead to a quantum leap in performance of wireless systems which will in turn facilitate a plethora of advanced applications such as high quality multimedia transmission over wireless networks, rescue and recovery operations, etc. Results will be disseminated through (i) publications of scholarly papers in premier journals and conferences and available through the world-wide-web, and (ii) direct interactions with wireless industry and non-profit organizations which will facilitate the design of wireless systems that can be effectively used in daily lives.
